The following is a very geeky, very niche1Where 'niche' is defined as 'of interest to maybe one person' tip, and I'm only documenting it here because it took me a while to figure it out, and I'd like to not have to go through that again if the need arises.
This site, and a few other personal projects, are hosted at Ionos, with whom I've been generally happy. On the web/GUI side, Ionos makes it really easy to control which version of PHP is used on your sites.
But I also have command line access to my server there, and I ran into an issue trying to run a PHP script (to upgrade another site). It threw an error, so I thought I'd check which version of PHP was in use…
$ which php
/usr/bin/php
$ /usr/bin/php --version
PHP 4.4.9 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Aug 29 2019 12:59:15)
Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2004 Zend Technologies
PHP 4.4.9 was discontinued in 2008—no wonder the script threw an error!
When I find things I enjoy watching on YouTube, sometimes I want to download them—because they may go away, or I may want to watch offline. There are any number of tools out there that will do this for you, including web sites and Mac-specific apps. On the Mac side, I had been using 4K Video Downloader, but recently found VIDL, which had one big advantage for me: It comes with a Safari toolbar icon.
When I see a video I want to keep, I click the VIDL toolbar button, and VIDL launches and downloads the video. (Because it's based on the open source youtube-dl, VIDL supports a lot more sites than does 4K Video Downloader, which is also nice.)
But recently, I noticed that some of the videos I downloaded with VIDL were at 640x360 resolution, even though the source on YouTube was at least 1920x1080. I tried those same URLs in 4K Video Downloader, and I was able to download the full HD versions. There aren't many settings in VIDL, so I didn't see any obvious way to force it to get higher resolution versions1youtube-dl is supposed to get the highest-resolution version automatically, so I switched back to 4K Video Downloader…but I really missed the handy toolbar button.
It's not like it was a lot of work to copy a URL, switch to 4K Video Downloader, and paste, but it was just enough work to get annoying. If I had the skills, writing a basic extension like this for Safari should be pretty simple. But as I don't have the skills, I went looking for another solution, and I found one using Automator:
I created a new Service in Automator that sends URLs to 4K Video Downloader via the contextual menu in Safari's URL bar.
If you're a macOS Catalina user, and a user of Terminal for various tasks, you might be surprised at how some things work—or rather, don't work, in Catalina. As a first example, consider the Utilities folder…on the left is how it appears in Finder, and on the right, the contents of that same folder listed in Terminal:
While Finder shows a full Utilities folder, Terminal shows it as empty. Why? If you're somewhat familiar with the technical side of macOS Catalina, you probably know the answer: Apple has separated much of the OS and placed it on a read-only volume.
Apple's "About the read-only system volume in macOS Catalina" page explains things fairly well—basically, what you see as one Utilities folder in Finder is really two things: A read-only Utilities folder, and a user-writable Utilities folder. (If my machine had any user-installed apps in the Utilities folder, they would have shown up in the Terminal output above.)
Important note: Please see the comments—the method I discuss here is secure from casual users. However, the Excel files are just zipped XML files, so it's possible to unzip them and open them with a text editor. When I tested with my dummy salary worksheet, I could see individual salary values, but no actual text—so there wasn't any way to associate a salary with a person. Still, the following should be considered as only a semi-safe solution.
My wife wants to create a budget spreadsheet for the various departments in her company to use. Each department would have their own tab, showing their planned yearly budget by month for the coming year. A super-simplified and unrealistic input worksheet might look like this:
The green areas are the portions that the users would fill out—probably not the department heads, but just someone in the department. Which leads to the problem: There's a worksheet called Salary Info that's used to populate the Salaries line in the workbook. (In my silly example, I just divided the total salary into four equal quarters.)
The problem is that the Salary Info worksheet contains salary information for the entire organization, and this isn't information that should be shared with everyone.The Salary Info sheet might reveal, for instance, that a coworker is leaving in three months—the coworker has told management, but the employee isn't ready to tell the entire company just yet.
So how can you distribute the workbook to all the departments, with the salary info intact, but without revealing that data to everyone?
Update: I guess I should have searched here before I posted this—I wrote up another solution a few years ago, and that one includes a Keyboard Maestro implementation. Whoops! As this one's another method, though, I'll leave it up.
I was working on some stuff for our upcoming Usher 2 release, and needed to know how long Usher had been running. A quick web search found this post, where one of the comments had an answer that works well in macOS:
ps -p pid -o lstart=
Replace pid with the process ID (PID) from ps -ax for the app or process in question, and you're done. But it's possible to make it even easier to use by automating the task of getting the process ID. Here's what I came up with:
At the end of 2016, I first posted about my run tracking Excel workbook. That first version was crude, but functional, and I used it to track every mile of my "2,016 miles in 2016" running goal. I posted a minor revision for 2017, then made some major updates for 2018. When 2019 rolled around, I made a few more changes, which I released by way of a note added to the 2018 post.
Now that 2020 is here—I know, it's a bit past January, sorry!—I've made yet more changes, and have decided it's time to replace both of the previous posts with one new all-in-one post. Here you'll find a link to the latest version of the workbook, as well as full instructions on how to use it.
Have you ever needed to create an empty folder structure with many levels of repetitively-named folders? This doesn't happen a lot, obviously, but if you try using Finder for this task, you'll quickly discover it's really tedious. But a quick trip to Terminal makes the task very fast, and it's not overly complicated.
Let's say you need a folder structure to handle reports that you'll be receiving weekly, but need to keep track of over both quarters and years. One way to handle that would be with a folder structure like this:
(Hopefully obviously, the same structure repeats within each separate year's folder.) Creating that many multi-leveled folders in Finder would be time consuming and tedious. But in Terminal, you can create the entire structure with just one command:
mkdir -p 202{0..5}/qtr{1..4}/week{1..13}
That command takes under a second on my iMac to create the entire directory structure (over 330 folders). Zoom! So how does this work?
Somewhat regularly, I write about ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays. I tend to prefer physical media and sometimes—especially when buying an older TV series or classic movie—the disc won't include a digital copy. So I rip the disc—this way for Blu-Rays, or just via HandBrake for DVDs—to create my own digital copy.
Once ripped, the problem is that I have a video file that will play, but that has no useful information about what the video is—no metadata about the cast, production year, or (for TV series) season and episode. If I try to add the movie to the TV app (or iTunes, as on my iMac), it will require some hand editing to wind up in the right category, and it still won't have any show information.
Enter Subler, a free app to help you "tag" (add metadata to) movies and TV shows. There are probably other apps out there that do this, but Subler works quite well for me, especially for TV shows.
When I rip a TV series, I'll give the files a filename based on its title and (for TV series) season and episode, like Wings S01E01, or Sports Night S02E04. I then drag and drop the ripped file onto Subler's dock icon, and it opens a window, showing all the metadata associated with the file; here's how the window looked after I ripped the first episode of Sports Night:
May 26 2020 Update: The 2020-003 Security Update for Mojave will reset the red flag (and deprecate the command used to ignore the update). However, these steps do still work, so you just have to repeat Miles' solution again. And after you do, do not open the Software Update panel, or the red badge will return. (But if it does, just run the commands yet again.)
May 9 2020 Update: Commenter Miles Wolbe has come up with a much better solution. Ignore everything in this tip, and just run this Terminal command:
If you're interested in why this works, Miles explains it in more detail. I've tested this method, and it works—no more agent required!
I have no plans to move my main iMac to macOS Catalina, at least for the forseeable future. There are two key apps I use—Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanner software and the Many Tricks' accounting app—that are both 32-bit. In addition, there are changes in Catalina relative to permissions that make it somewhat Vista like and slow down my interaction with the system. (My MacBook Air is my "production" Catalina Mac, and I have an older retina MacBook Pro that I use for Catalina betas.)
But Apple really wants people to update to Catalina, so they let you know about Catalina…constantly, it seems. In System Preferences > Software Update, you'll see this…
Say I’ve resized a window to the dimensions I want. Is there a way to figure out what these are so I can create a resize action in Moom?
Basically, the user wants to save a window size as a custom action, to make it easy to reapply that action to any window. (If it were just one window in one app, you could use Moom's Save Window Layout feature to save that layout for easy recall.)
There is a way to see this info in Moom, but it requires enabling our debug log and digging through a bunch of output. As an easier alternative, I was certain that AppleScript could do this; I fiddled a bit on my own, and did some web searching, which led me to this thorough post on StackExchange.
Using the very first bit of the first script there, I came up with this version:
Of course, me being me, I decided I'd spend a couple hours making it more useful, even though I probably won't use it all that often. So I modified it to work for whichever app is frontmost, and made it run from Keyboard Maestro. I then assigned it a gesture trigger with my mouse, so I can easily see any window's dimensions with a simple mouse movement.
Enter 
